The past half century has been very kind to Shakespeare's clowns. They have become figures of subversion in the work of two east-European critics, Mikhail Bakhtin and Jan Kott, both of whom continue to enjoy extraordinary influence in the Anglophone world. Such an understanding of clowns draws on the belief that play must be understood in opposition to the seriousness of the official world and, in particular, to war. This belief can be traced to Plato's declaration in his Laws that ‘in war there is neither play nor culture worthy the name’. Johan Huizinga cites Plato on this point both at the beginning and end of Homo Ludens. More recently, Martin van Creveld cites Huizinga at the beginning of Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes. In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, however, the paradigmatic clown proves vicious, while games of love and chivalry prove helpless to halt the fictive world's descent into total war. Games take place, at best, in parentheses. The title characters’ erotic relationship, the gallantry of knights meeting for tournaments, the battles pursued so lackadaisically as to make truce indistinguishable from war are all swept aside by a movement to extreme violence and the inevitable destruction of Troy. Throughout Shakespeare's tragedy, the supposed opposition of play and war proves false.

Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World elevates clowns from the trivial role of providing so-called ‘comic relief’ to ‘the constant, accredited representatives of the carnival spirit in everyday life’. The carnival itself Bakhtin understands as ‘the people's second life, organized on the basis of laughter. It is a festive life’.